"I not going to tell you again how I even feel about Israel, but why [are] we still talking about it," Obama said, reminding his guests that all his friends in Chicago were Jewish - and at the beginning of his political career he was accused of being a puppet of the Israel lobby. ...

Obama also stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it - and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel [sic] about their support to Israel."

... 1. The reason no one asks John Boehner or Mitch McConnell about their support for Israel is ... because they really do support Israel. The reason people ask Barack Obama about his support for Israel is because his support for Israel has been equivocal. [Ed: at best.]

2. It's truly pathetic that Obama has to reach for the tired (to say the least) trope that some of his best friends were Jewish. Actually, one wishes more of his best friends were pro-Israel Christians. They might have had more luck convincing him, a fellow Christian, that he should be pro-Israel.

3. And the claim that Obama knows more about Judaism than any president? His vanity boggles the mind. One could begin by citing Adams and Madison, who knew Hebrew, or Harry Truman, who knew Jewish history ... but it's silly to dignify this claim with a rebuttal. In thinking about the presidents since Truman, though, I'd guess the president who knew the most about Judaism was Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school and had a deep interest in religion. So let's stipulate that of the modern presidents, Carter and Obama "know" the most about Judaism. But what is it they know? In Obama's case, one could ask whether what he “knows” is what he learned from Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright.

The FBI is warning traveling commercial and government laptop users that malicious programs can worm their way onto their machines through hotel connections overseas through bogus software updates.

A May 21 bulletin from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warns that malware disguised as innocuous software updates awaits unwary travelers as they log onto hotel-hosted Internet connections. The agency said recent analysis from its investigators and other government agencies showed that Cyber criminals are targeting travelers through pop-up windows while they connect to the Internet in their hotel rooms. Apparently, criminals set up bogus hotel connections to intercept traffic before the hotel guest can reach the legitimate hotel connection.

It said recent cases show the malware presents the traveler with a pop-up window telling them to update a widely-used software product.

In these instances, the travelers attempting to set up the hotel room Internet connection and was presented with a pop-up window notifying the user to update a widely used software product, it said. The pop-up window looks like a common software update notice, according to the agency. If the laptop user clicks on “accept” to install the update, they install the malware.

IC3 recommended all government, private industry, and academic personnel traveling abroad be extra cautious before updating software using hotel Internet connections. It also recommended checking the author or digital certificate of any prompted update to see if it corresponds to the software vendor. If it doesn’t, it may reveal an attempted attack, it said.

The only way to even try to mitigate these kinds of threats is to surf immediately to a known SSL proxy site (e.g., your company's SSL VPN). By surfing to a known SSL site first, you can avoid the most common man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

A typical MITM attack delivers a non-SSL web page to your browser, but also includes some very special (and unwelcome) malware. The intent is to exploit your browser's vulnerabilities using specially crafted HTTP/HTML-based attacks. Or, in the case, the MITM attempts a social engineering attack, using the promise of a software update.

Surfing directly to a safe SSL site may help -- but isn't guaranteed -- to mitigate the threat. SSL to a trusted site is, in nearly all cases, impossible to MITM. But I say it isn't guaranteed because a hotel could deliver a landing page (e.g., to prompt you to enter the hotel's Internet pass-phrase) prior to letting you surf SSL. And that landing page could theoretically launch an attack.

The best advice would be to dispense with the laptop on your trip abroad. If you can't do that, travel with a pristine (newly imaged) laptop and then get it re-imaged when you return.

The funny thing is, President Obama still tries to blame President Bush for the current and ongoing malaise. But everyone knows that Obama had Congressional super-majorities of Democrats for his first two years in office. And they implemented every single progressive wet-dream possible, from Obamacare, to Cash-for-Clunkers, to various mortgage programs, to "Financial Reform", to green energy scams, and heaven knows what else.

• 1Q GDP was revised down to 1.9% from 2.2%. The previous four GDP quarters of Obama recovery: 0.4%, 1.3%, 1.8%, 3.0%. Keep in mind that research from the Federal Reserve finds that that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 48 percent of the time...

• Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 383,000. Claims have now risen in seven of the past eight weeks. The four-week moving average for new claims increased 3,750 to 374,500.

• ADP said 133,000 private-sector jobs were created in May vs. analyst expectations of 150,000.

• Job cuts jumped by 53% in May from April... according to a report by consultancy firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. CNBC also notes that “employers announced plans to cut 61,887 staff from their payrolls in May, 67 percent more than in the same month of last year. The figure represents the most job cuts since last September.”

• The Rasmussen Consumer Index find that 59% think the U.S. is currently in a recession.

James Pethokoukis includes the accompanying chart in his piece, which tracks President Obama's Intrade reelection odds. While they're dropping, they remain over 50 percent.

Which means all of us have much more work to do: educating our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members.

Now this is a great use of mapping historical data to a geospatial representation.

John Nelson used 56 years worth of NOAA data to create a beautiful map of the most powerful tornadoes of the past five-plus decades.

Got this data from NOAA via the spectacular Data.gov. It tracks 56 years of tornado paths along with a host of attribute information. Here, the tracks are categorized by their F-Scale (which isn't the latest and greatest means but good enough for a hack like me), where brighter strokes represent more violent storms.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The word disgusting doesn't begin to describe the actions of these progressive loons -- especially seeing as how we're just hours after Memorial Day.

The scene: a town-hall event for Rep. Allen West. At the behest of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or her ilk, progressives make a make a habit of targeting West because they hate the Constitution and they despise America*. They know that West stands for both -- and, unlike these punks, he's put his life on the line protecting their right to protest him.

In what appears to be the aftermath of a town-hall, several World War II vets stand up for West as a couple of the moonbats try to insult him.

Instead of honoring their service, the liberals go after these heroes, to the point of putting hands on one while dropping the f-bomb on him.

Because that's the way liberals roll, don't ya know?

These progressives disgust me. They ought to hang their heads in shame, but that would require the capability of actually feeling shame.

Take heart, patriots, because November is coming.

* Sorry, drones, but you can't love America and support a presidential candidate who repeatedly promises to 'fundamentally transform' it, as Barack Obama did.

I wasn't blessed to know Ronald Reagan, but Mr. Obama -- you are definitely no Ronald Reagan. In fact, you're not even in the same league.

Forget the Reagan recovery. What if the Obama recovery was just, you know, average? Maybe in some alternate reality Obama’s stimulus plan involved cutting taxes for investors and entrepreneurs. And maybe Earth-Two Obama took a pass on government-centered healthcare reform.

Up is down, left is right, good is bad, and day is night. If you wander inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, you’ll enter a bizarro world where, at times, commonsense is replaced by a localized logic that is completely divorced from the reality.

The latest example of political gobbledygook comes courtesy of White House press secretary Jay Carney, who yesterday lapsed into rambling rhetoric when asked to explain how President Obama can defend the failed Solyndra solar boondoggle, yet attack private sector investments that sometimes fail but oftentimes succeed. Here’s his response:

Look…there, there, there is the…the…difference in that, your overall view of what…huh, your responsibilities are as president and what your view of the economic future is.

And the president believes as he’s made clear that a president’s responsibility is not just to, ah, those who win but those who, for example in a company where ah, there have been layoffs or a company that has gone bankrupt, that we have to ah make sure that those folks have the means to find other employment, that they have the ability to train for other kinds of work and that’s part of the overall responsibility a president has.

Got all that?

For the duration of his Administration, President Obama has dished out billions of dollars to politically favored companies in pursuit of job creation and a new “green” economy. It’s taxpayer-funded crony capitalism that has neither created new jobs nor produced the green-energy payout that the president was looking for. In fact, it’s a policy that has failed miserably, leading to bankruptcy after bankruptcy. Yet despite all the failures — and zero successes — the president and his Administration are defending the indefensible and standing by a policy that has squandered taxpayer money.

In one instance, President Obama committed $465 million of taxpayer money to Tesla, which was founded by a campaign mega-donor and the 63rd richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to build a $130,000 battery-powered sports car that becomes permanently inoperable if left uncharged for 30 days...

At the same time the president is defending his taxpayer-funded failures, he’s attacking free enterprise, including in private equity and venture capitalism — enterprises in which investors voluntarily put up their own money to invest in new ideas and rescue existing companies. Sometimes those ventures fail, sometimes their inevitable failure is delayed but temporarily saves jobs amid restructuring, but many times they succeed — generating profits and producing new jobs.

When Carney was asked to justify the president’s defense of one, but criticism of the other, he just couldn’t do it. That’s no surprise, in that the two positions are logically inconsistent.

This episode calls to mind a quote from George Orwell, a frequent and pointed critic of modern political discourse:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms …

...In Washington, the Obama Administration is hard at work defending the crony capitalist machine while lambasting the free market system — and it shows no signs of letting up.

[LLP] announced they've already "signed a contract on May 20 with the Plasma Physics Research Center (PPRC) of I. Azad University in Tehran, Iran." ... A quick Internet search of this Iranian institution — consisting of a chain of colleges — shows that its full name is "Islamic Azad University." It's a small detail, but a little strange of the LLP official press release to diminish their new partner's name to a mere I. It just looked like someone wanted to dust that fact under the rug.

But how is this partnership even possible given U.S.-Iran relations? Well, there's a loop-hole:

The agreement falls within an exemption to the otherwise broad sanctions of the US against Iran. The US Department of Treasury’s regulations include a general license which “authorizes collaborating with “academics and research institutions” of sanctioned countries on the… creation and enhancement of written publications.”

The two research teams will collaborate on writing scientific publications about their joint discoveries on aneutronic fusion. The LLP [site] explains:

In the past three years, Iran has become a major player in the small but growing global effort to achieve aneutronic fusion power—controlled nuclear fusion using fuels that produce no neutrons. Controlled fusion harnesses the power that heats the sun--nuclear fusion--as a source of energy for peaceful purposes. Fuels that don’t produce neutrons are important because neutrons can be extremely destructive, damaging the structure of a fusion generator and inducing radioactivity.

...Fars News Agency reports that LLP's work could be a game-changer, if things go to plan: it's "one of several small companies that believe they can crack fusion far sooner than can ITER or the National Ignition Facility (NIF), another international behemoth, based in Livermore, California. "

Methinks that LLP's head of public relations is fielding some calls as we speak. If this report is accurate, LLP should consider relocating to Tehran to get all of the true benefits of their partnership.

Cornucopia

QOTD: "We conservatives in talk radio, we come under blistering attack from the Left, from phony reporters, even from executives in this business or in that business. And really when you think about what most of us say and how most of us behave and how and many of us have passion and so forth. It’s the way nature, it’s the way people operate and work normally. You know, you’re not a talking head. You’re a human being with emotions and moods and interests, and some things rile you and some things make you happy, some things get you excited. You know?…But there are lines. And the lines for conservative talkers are much tighter, much harsher than they are for the others.

Al Sharpton is a disgrace. And yet everybody’s afraid of him. He’s on the radio. NBC News hires him over at MSNBC, or MSLSD as I call it. He brings nothing to the table. Nothing. He can barely speak in complete sentences. No, it’s true. He’s a race-baiter in my humble opinion. You saw what he did in Florida, first one on the scene if not the early ones in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case. And that’s certainly not the first. And yet, he’s not considered that controversial.

But today I’m calling for the, for the firing of Al Sharpton. I don’t believe I’ve ever done this before…But enough is enough. It’s not a bad word here or a bad thought, bad comment here over a long record. No, this man is loathsome." --Mark Levin

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Microsoft has patented an online personal appearance adviser for those of us without a hotline straight through to Put This On's Jesse Thorn...

...Simply upload a pair of pictures of yourself in different hair, makeup and clothing choices and let the denizens of the internet vote on which one makes you look the best. Sounding similar to HotorNot and FaceMash, this patent purports to shift the emphasis to help the style-challenged choose a suitable wardrobe.

Not to be overly morbid, but you can just envision the lawsuits after the first angst-ridden teen commits suicide post-"appearance adviser".

Backdoor Found in Chinese-Made Military Silicon Chips

"Claims were made by the intelligence agencies around the world, from MI5, NSA and IARPA, that silicon chips could be infected. We developed breakthrough silicon chip scanning technology to investigate these claims. We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure."

...The chip in question was designed in the U.S. by a U.S. company, but manufactured in China.

Anything (and I do mean anything) manufactured in the PRC could well have some very special -- and undocumented -- functionality courtesy of the PLA (People's Liberation Army).

I am hopeful that most sophisticated buyers were already aware of this possibility.

The Cato Institute helps refute the laughable administration claims that President Obama is some sort of deficit hawk. That could be true, but -- if so -- it's only in some sort of alternate universe, like the one where Mr. Spock wears a Fu Manchu mustache.

...the main debate is about which president was the biggest overall spender. So I’ve run through the numbers... and here’s a new table looking at the rankings based on average annual changes in inflation-adjusted primary spending, minus the distorting impact of deposit insurance and TARP.

Obama is still in the second-to-last position, but spending is increasing by “only” 5.5 percent per year rather than 7.0 percent annually. This is obviously because defense spending is not growing as fast as domestic spending.

Reagan remains in first place, though his score drops now that his defense buildup is part of the calculations. Clinton, conversely, stays in second place but his score jumps because he benefited from the peace dividend after Reagan’s policies led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Let’s now look at these numbers from a policy perspective. Rahn Curve research shows that government is far too big today, so the goal of fiscal policy should be to restrain the burden of government spending relative to economic output.

This means that policy moves in the right direction when government grows more slowly than the private sector, as it did under Reagan and Clinton.

But if government spending is growing faster than the productive sector of the economy, as has been the case during the Bush-Obama years, then a nation eventually will become Greece.

In emulating President Obama, I feel it imperative that we identify a scapegoat for this disaster. And who better than George W. Bush? Or, at the very least, Millard Fillmore? Or anyone but the Democrat National Committee's Wall Street backers, in fact.

Pain, pain, and more pain for Facebook’s stock. Facebook sunk into the $20s for the first time today, declining about 9 percent as options trading started. The decline also came a day after a third wave of reports came out about a Facebook phone, which would push the company into the risky and expensive world of building hardware.

Shares hit a new low of $28.65 and have closed nearly 10 percent lower at $28.84. After-hours trading has the company down another 0.5 percent to $28.69. That gives the company a market capitalization of $79.02 billion, down from $115 billion market cap Facebook opened at on the day of its IPO when it started trading at $42.05 a share.** (That said, if you’re a glass-is-half-full kind of person, Facebook is now cheap, cheap, cheap!)

The key factor affecting share prices might be options trading. Bloomberg said that puts are exceeding calls by 1.3-to-1.

This must be a good thing, right? Because we know that income inequality is evil. Certainly it's not fair that Facebook's founders are worth billions. We need everyone to be equal, kind of like in North Korea or Cuba or Zimbabwe.

Cornucopia

QOTD: "The cartel henchman nicknamed "El Loco" was reported behind the latest atrocity in Mexico's ever-more-depraved drug war: mutilating 49 people and piling their bodies — heads, hands and feet missing — by the side of a road leading to the U.S. border.

Authorities say he acted this month on orders from the top commanders of the brutal Zeta paramilitary force, who wanted to send a message to the long-dominant Sinaloa cartel and its allies, in a new phase of a conflict that has claimed more than 50,000 lives in less than six years...

...In the most brazen offensive of that war, the Zetas, smelling an opportunity, are moving steadily deeper into their enemy's ancestral homeland... Residents say the feud between the two cartels is starting to look like a civil war." --Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

Monday, May 28, 2012

Tablets are likely to become the primary computing experience for workers over the next few years. What will it take to successfully shift IT delivery to these devices given the security worries, legacy IT landscape, BYOD, and other issues?

A few weeks ago the IT analyst firm Forrester made what is probably the first major declaration that tablets will soon become the primary computing device for most users, even going so far as to say that they will ‘rule’ personal computing in the near future. While I think the numbers speak for themselves on this, I also believe that many organizations are either unready or unwilling to hear this yet.

Part of the reason for this avoidance is because of the substantial overhaul it will require IT departments to undergo, and major change is invariably painful and difficult. This retooling includes the full gamut of IT responsibilities: Infrastructure, architecture, processes, tools, skills, and governance, right when so many companies are also dealing with many other generational IT disruptions.

Another reason for unpreparedness is that the tablet revolution has largely become a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon...

...The real lesson is this: To get the primary advantages of tablets will require more than paving the old cowpath (i.e. merely conducting a literal translation of legacy IT to tablets.) Tablets are fundamentally different computing devices with entirely new capabilities. To get the real competitive advantage of the next-generation of end-user computing will require rethinking how tablets and their innate capabilities and strengths can be used to transform business processes. Location-awareness, always-connectedness, augmented reality, pervasive video/audio, and more can create highly situational and context-aware apps that hold the potential to provide hard business benefits. These benefits include boosting worker productivity, improving decision making, saving time, enabling more self-service, and reinventing business processes to operate in deeply integrated, highly immersive, and seamless new ways.

Suffice it to say that these changes -- BYOD and tablet computing -- are so disruptive that many companies' IT shops will have real difficulty making the shift.

This Memorial Day, when we remember those who paid the ultimate price protecting our precious country, I ask you to remember one recent incident that demonstrates what our president really thinks of us. It occurred in March, when ABC News' Jake Tapper reported that President Obama was caught on an open microphone telling Russian President Medvedev that once he's reelected, he won't have to bother with those pesky Americans who are worried about sharing missile defense secrets.

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

“If there was any doubt how dangerous Barack Obama would be for America’s security in a second term, the president put all uncertainty to rest today,” said the source, who closely tracks foreign policy matters. “The president just told us that he is itching to hand over America’s most secret missile defense data to a country that is arming Syria and fueling Iran’s Bushehr reactor—and he would do it today but for his re-election concerns. With no political constraints in a second term, who knows what Obama will do.”

The adviser also said Obama’s remarks should cause concern among pro-Israel forces in America.

“If this is what the president’s promising the Russians on missile defense, God only knows what he’s promising Arab leaders about Israel,” noted the souce. “If you think Barack Obama was bad for Israel in term one, put your seatbelt on and get ready for term two.”

As you know, in the FY12 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress enacted, and you signed into law, a provision constraining your ability to share classified U.S. missile defense information with the Russian Federation. Congress took this step because it was clear based on official testimony and Administration comments in the press that classified information about U.S. missile defenses, including hit-to-kill technology and velocity at burnout information, may be on the table as negotiating leverage for your reset with Russia. Despite signing the FY12 defense authorization legislation into law, you then issued a signing statement signaling that you may treat that provision protecting U.S. missile defense information as non-binding. This morning’s comments, on top of that action, suggests that you and your administration have plans for U.S. missile defenses that you believe will not stand up to electoral scrutiny.

Congress has made exquisitely clear to your Administration and to other nations that it will block all attempts to weaken U.S. missile defenses. As the Chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, which authorizes U.S. missile defense and nuclear weapons policy, I want to make perfectly clear that my colleagues and I will not allow any attempts to trade missile defense of the United States to Russia or any other country.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today denied the American Petroleum Institute s (API s) request to eliminate mandates for biofuels that do not exist, and the agency continues to fine refiners for not using them.

[The] EPA's mandate is out of touch with reality and forces refiners to pay a penalty for not using imaginary biofuels, said API Director of Downstream and Industry Operations Bob Greco. EPA's unrealistic mandate is effectively an added tax on making gasoline.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to determine the mandated volume of cellulosic biofuels each year at the projected volume available. However, in 2011 EPA required refineries to use 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels even though, according to EPA s own records, none were commercially available. EPA today denied API's 2011 petition for reconsideration of the mandate and continues to mandate these nonexistent biofuels this year.

The fact that EPA continues to mandate these biofuels that do not exist is regulatory absurdity and bad public policy, Greco said.

API represents more than 500 oil and natural gas companies, leaders of a technology-driven industry that supplies most of America s energy, supports 9.2 million U.S. jobs and 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy, delivers more than $86 million a day in revenue to our government, and, since 2000, has invested more than $2 trillion in U.S. capital projects to advance all forms of energy, including alternatives.

Of course, Obama, Nutting and the rest of the sycophants avoid the real comparison: actual deficits rung up by each president's policy choices (and those of Congress). In the case of President Obama's first two years in office, Democrat super-majorities in the House and the Senate helped him enact a virtual wish-list of Fabian socialism, from the Stimulus, to multiple attempts to fix the housing market, to "financial reform", to Obamacare.

Over the past 50 years, 10 U.S. presidents have made annual budget requests to Congress, projecting deficits both big and small. But no other president compares to Barack Obama when it comes to the size and scale of the current budget deficit facing the United States.

The country is facing an 8.3 percent estimated average national deficit of a two-term Obama administration — the biggest of the past 50 years.

A striking chart showing that, over the last decade, 65 percent of federal expenditures went to pay for entitlement commitments, not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense, or national security:

"About 65 percent of federal expenditures over the last ten years have gone towards entitlements," Paul Miller writes. "By comparison, about 15 percent has gone towards national defense, excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq has cost three percent, and only about one percent has gone towards the war in Afghanistan (including the cost of ongoing military operations and all reconstruction and stabilization assistance combined), according to my analysis of figures from OMB."

In other words, Miller says, "Afghanistan is the second-cheapest major war in U.S. history as a percentage of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service."

Iraq and Afghanistan represent a pittance, a rounding error, for this federal leviathan.

And yet another Democrat myth gets obliterated like the propaganda it is. One day these clowns might actually get something right, though that would require kicking the Marxist-Progressive Fifth Column out of the party.

QOTD: "This site has always promoted free speech and the idea of merit-based intellectualism (recall, I used to invite leftwing bloggers to guest post here, and I invited debates between competing ideological positions); it has fought consistently — and with much vigor — against a progressive epistemological paradigm that hopes to decouple meaning from intent and replace the locus of meaning with motivated “interpretive communities” in a (political) linguistic coup that I’ve spent years pointing out is the anti-foundational justification for collectivism and, ultimately, intellectual (and eventually political) totalitarianism. From identity politics to political correctness to the idea that the receiver of a message gets to determine its meaning with respect to the intentions of the speaker, the left’s philosophical agenda has been to diminish the individual and raise the collective, to empower political blocs (which the left plays against each other, and also collects into its voting coalition by way of often competing panders) and to de-authenticate the individual, particularly if he refuses to adopt the identity narrative put forth by the given group to which he is ostensibly socially assigned." --Protein Wisdom